2000 Miles

2000 Miles – The Pretenders

This is a simple but tastefully arranged Christmas song that avoids most of the excesses typical of Christmas music. It’s one of those ones no-one thinks they know, and then they hear it and they actually do. It has THREE CHORDS, which you already know – G, C and D. The original uses variations on these chords, Cadd9 and Dsus2. These are not any harder, and depending where you’re at with your playing you can play the three string versions by just ignoring the bottom three strings on the chord diagrams below.  It has a really nice riff which runs all the way through too, and has a lilting rhythm.  The arrangement makes effective use of changing the section lengths in the second half to disrupt our expectation of what’s going to happen next, which prevents a quite simple repeating chord structure from being boring.

 

Check out the music for riff below the chords – it’s a two bar segment.

 AUDIOS – original tempo

Slower

Structure – There’s an intro-but this is written from when the vocals come in.

Verse 1 – Round the G/Cadd9/Dsus2 eight times.

Refrain 1 – C/D Twice

Bridge 1 – Same as verse, played a couple of times as a breather before the vocals come back in.

Verse 2 – Same as verse 1

Refrain 2 – Same

Bridge 2 – Same

Verse 3 – Shorter! Four times round the chords, not eight.

Refrain 3 – same

Bridge 3 – same

Verse 4 – Back to eight times round the chords

Refrain 4 – same

Bridge – played only once as a sandwich between a repeated refrain

Refrain – Same

Then fade out on the verse chords.